My brothers and sisters are a mixed bag when it comes to gender issues. When compared to his son’s mother, one of my brothers is more nurturing, but only if making a doormat of yourself is your idea of nurturing. And speaking of gender issues, he expected our entire family to genuflect when, following four girls, he and his wife issued forth the first male child. As of today, his expectations remain unfulfilled. One of my sisters goes back and forth. I’ve heard her girls get away with saying things to her that would have earned me, at the very least, a not very gracious trip to my room without dessert. I’ve also heard her house fall completely silent after she told one of my nieces that she was about to use her head as a basketball.
My Oklahoma nieces are even more of a mixed bag. The oldest, who is 20 and is named after my mother, is some sort of throwback to the 1950s. She and her mother – my sister – carry on like co-conspirators, with my sister teaching her daughter the ins and outs of snagging a man with the means to keep the trains, if you will, running on schedule. My niece dropped out of college after three weeks and moved back home – home being something of a spa where everything is provided, so I cannot exactly blame her, although there’s not much I wouldn’t have done at the age of 18 to have parents who would pay for me to go away. She takes courses at the community college and waitresses. She has her own apartment although I seriously doubt she pays all of her own rent (I could be wrong on that). She brings her laundry over for my sister to do, and when there are car problems or burned out light bulbs daddy is but a phone call away. My niece is tall and beautiful and her main objective, she told me, is to know how to make a good roast and mix cocktails and have dinner parties for her and her eventual husband’s friends. Her three-week university career was not without some accomplishment: she met a guy to whom she’s now engaged. He’s in the military at the moment and stationed overseas, but he’ll be home, in the word’s of her father – my brother-in-law – quicker than three shakes of the lamb’s tail. Since this is my blog, I have the right to say what I really think without cushiony adjectives: what a disaster.
My other niece, who just turned 18, couldn’t be more different. She shaved her head in solidarity with her mother. She is an aspiring tattoo artist, but when I talked to her last summer, she said she needed to come up with a backup plan because she didn’t figure the tattoo business was the surest bet. A backup plan wouldn’t occur to her sister in a million years. The younger of my two nieces in Oklahoma is unimpressed with boys, so unimpressed, in fact, that she’s a lesbian. This is an issue that was pushed by my sister, of all people, a few years ago when she decided she didn’t like the idea of one of her daughters not “bringing her girlfriend around.”
And so she does. When I was growing up, our dinner table conversations usually revolved around politics but at my sister’s table, the discussions are a little more immediate: my older niece’s fiance’s whereabouts, Business 101, how much longer my younger niece’s girlfriend is going to be grounded, the potential risks of the ink used for tattoos, the best – and worst – ways to treat constipation (my sister’s all-time favorite topic) and what needs to be added to the QuickTrip shopping list. It’s a different world down there in the Mid City neighborhood, but when I was there last month, when the lighting was set a certain way, when certain angles were employed, I’d look at my nieces and see, for one brief moment, my mother, which was a surprisingly pleasant experience.
